Kennedy & Knock-Knees

“The future’s made of virtual insanity.” That’s what he said.

This morning, all of a sudden like, whilst deep in a relegation-centred reverie, an unseen force lifted me up on to me tippy-toes. Violently. This sudden growth spurt was not by virtue of eating a fistful of baby spinach for breakfast, but as a result of Mr Jewry (at the next stall) a-twisting my ear‘ole between his thumb and forefinger whilst simultaneously grinding a whelk into the North End Road tarmac with the heel of his superannuated Loakes. Obstreperous bumpkin!

“The future’s made of virtual insanity”, he ejaculated whilst performing this grievous act.

Now, I may be little more than an honest cripple with a crafty aspect, but whatever the future is, in fact, made of, my immediate one will see me knock-kneeing it up the Holloway Road this coming Sunday afternoon. Not even Mr. Jay Kay is gonna stop me from doing that!

Of necessity, I shall be decidedly post-prandial, having had an apron full of belly timber, pre bully-off. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to cheer in the face of overwhelming odds on an empty stomach. P’raps I should eat the form book for lunch! That’ll be a superior remedy chums, killing, as it were, two sparrows with one stone.

Now, my most admirable black-and-white comrades, once inside that unholy corporate dustbowl, we may well be little more than the equivalent of a few sprats in a Sperm Whale’s gullet, but that’s no excuse for being shrinking scaredy-cats, or sickly, weak-limbed lightweights. We need gallons of spunk, spine, spirit, and steel. We must merge together, into a kind of seething amorphous mass, and will ourselves to become more than the sum of our parts. To make a sound that science can’t contain.

Whatever the flavour of the on-pitch shenanigans, however grisly in nature the goings-on in front of us, we must continue to rage regardless. Like oaks in a gale, like clocks in a thunderstorm.

We must inspire our fragile heroes to step out from under the shadow of underachievement, to liberate themselves, and to shake hands with greatness.

Because as we all know, friends: the mediocre are many but the prime number few.

So prepare yourself, one and all. As Mr. Kennedy may have once said: “ask not what your club can do for you; ask what you can do for your club.”

Now is the time to do it: let’s set the day on fire!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Churchill & Consummation

Holy unconsummated desire, Fulham-minded mates of mine!

What was last Saturday just gone all about then? Hatfuls of sunshine, but precious little plunder.

It was what Mr Churchill might have called: “a fatal neutrality”.

To labour my metaphor from last week just a touch longer, Saturday was like romancing the woman of your dreams into bed, only to find out that it was your sister, and that the law of the land prevented you from progressing. Your pistol’s cocked, but the target’s moved.

I don’t know what we do with ourselves for the next week now. I can’t take much more of this 11-a-side hole-and-corner intrigue. I reckon Mr Dante could conjure up a more welcoming retreat than that which we have to occupy over the next few days.

I‘ve already spent a whole day moping around the church, whilst Ma freshened up the font with some tallow and beeswax. I was supposed to be helping her, placing some fresh rushes up the old rector’s passage, but my noggin just wasn’t working proper.

I kept drifting off into these spacious, left-handed reveries, where Mr Sanchez was forcing the players to undergo a kind of penitence, thrashing each other with fresh leeks, and poking each other in the eyes with sticks of celery. I know what your thinking: I’d been tea-leafing magic mushrooms from the hippy fella in the market. The ones he reckons are capable of making you see people what, like, aren’t really there. Well no, my suspicious ones, I hadn’t, but I reckon some of our players might have indulged a touch, what with their strange habit of passing the ball into places where the sober amongst us can’t see a dicky bird.

Anyway, you know I’d swap a skip full of shin plasters and the seat of my smartest puppy-tooth tufnells for us to survive this current episode. And I know you know.

“Wars are not won by evacuations”, the great man said. And I’m of a mind to agree with him.

In the meantime chums, lets keep our collective peckers up, and our upper lips resolutely stiffened.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Tragedies & Trollopes

Thursday-shaped greetings, Fulham friends.

It may, indeed, be Thursday, but I say: enough of this dilly-dandering! The hour is, is it not, at hand. Or at least it will be come 3.00 this next Saturday coming.

A tall, thin gentleman from Ireland once mused: “The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes over life and death and other tuppeny aches”

Meanwhile, some shorter, less thin, and marginally less austere fellows once expounded: “Tragedy – when the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on.”

Whatever the great poets might have said about it, the question currently buzzin’ ‘round my noggin, Cottaging associates, is this one: are we about to enter into a slow-time waltz with Lady Tragedy? Are we about to slip ‘tween the bedclothes with Dame Disaster? Come Saturday tea-time will be collectively fingering the gusset of Madame Misfortune?

Or, and this is the twenty-bob poser, will we be gang-banging the Trollope of Triumph?

And if we are, will we, post-coitus, be gorging ourselves on the victuals of victory: to be specific, will we be eating SW6 out of turnip crudités and hare-pie scramble come Saturday evening?

I don’t know what you lot drape your languid frames in of a Sunday, but I, for one, don’t want to be spending this coming next one, mooching around the North End Road in my mourning jewellery, considering the pros and cons of watching our crestfallen, emasculated, black and whiters playing 22-man kickaround against Burnley next season.

Therefore, and to be perfectly blunt, now is not the time for indulging in fruitless chin music, or pondering how you narrowly missed a career as Yannick Noah’s foot masseuse. We need to have our eyes lined up on the prize, strutting shoulder to shoulder down the Stevenage, buttocks taut, and chins a-juttin’.

As Mr Dickens might say “Give it mouth!”

For one brief interlude, let’s put the inexpressible, unavoidable, malaise of human existence from our minds, and make it a glorious day, filled with sunshine and plunder.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!